Aug. 6, 2023
Read time: 3 minutes and 38 seconds.
tags:Society has been shifting quite a bit where the once required belief in God has been slowly and steadily replaced by governance. Religion’s global decline is a sad trend that has casualties all along the way, and those are you and me. Even if you’re a firm believer or not, there’s been this shift in culture where individuals no longer set a dedicated time to having a relationship with an external god, but instead have replaced it with filler like doom scrolls and B rated movies. People are losing a key source of purpose in their lives. This isn’t about “what” or “how,” but why we live and adapt.
Science, from Galileo to modern physics, relies on testable assumptions. I’ve seen science as a talking point used to justify atheism and non-belief throughout the history of humanity. But there are somethings that science doesn’t really account for along the way, and it rarely has a reflective turning point like others consistently have with religion. Science along the way has committed a lot of mistakes…permeated for centuries without question. But faith offers something different. It is a belief in a higher power that grounds us and not at all based in the ideals of man. Although we share what we believe and the historic stories we think are true, we swear by it based on faith, not by fact. Science, on the other hand, tries to base things on fact where fact, as a whole, is a new and untested concept.
If you look at the topics of history, or theory we use in mathematics or physics, we have constants that are based on humans’ best guess that are questioned less than super natural phenomena that has survived longer than Science has existed. We challenge God more than the basis of ideas founded by individuals who couldn’t work a fridge or a cell phone.
we are comparing two starkly different ideas with the hope to make them comparable, but it’s apples and oranges. The basis of Science is in what has happened whereas the basis of religion is an understanding of how it was or how others had lived.
Losing faith creates a void. I’ve seen friends struggle with this, searching for meaning in all the wrong places. Whether it’s shallow relationships, convincing others that their beliefs are incorrect or going through the motions of life without purpose because they’ve expected so much more. As if some divine intervention is going to strike them and inconclusively display God before their eyes. This void can lead to cynicism, anxiety, and a host of mental struggles.
Instead of seeing that community and culture are cornerstones of religion. That, without fait, people will still seek out alternatives and use substitutes in place of God. And the substitutes that exist in place of God are incomparable without even coming close to what we actually need.
For a long time, I was an atheist myself and truly lacked belief, but this is throughout a time where I was convinced that I had a majority of the answers and there were few left for me to reveal. I’ve since seen how poor this type of thinking was for me and have decisively made my relationship with God a top priority and public.
Many discredit faith, even seeing themselves as gods in their own story. However, for those that don’t and jsutify the merits of atheism, they may or may not realize that they slowly begin to replace their belief in God with something else. Which is really the government that becomes that “ruling” higher power. What seems to be the most ironic part of this all is that the original scientists, like Descartes and Galileo, sought to understand God through their work.Early scientists were often devout believers who used science and mathematics alongside discovery as a means of understanding God more by the ways that they best could. It’s also another reason why it’s hard to have a single governing body on religion and what to believe since faith is internal, not institutional.
True faith is about your personal relationship with God. What really matters is what you tell yourself and what you hear from God. It’s not about what science or the government dictates to you. God is the ultimate judge in my life and I boast in my weakness before Him. I’ve grown a lot and have been humbled by my spiritual journey that has taught me a lot in such a roundabout way a collective wisdom that is common to some.
So, as society drifts from faith, it often replaces it with governing bodies. But the core question remains: who will you choose to guide your life?